Distemper

by Beth Saulnier

  I’m not particularly proud to admit it, but the truth is that I wasn’t thinking much about poor Justice and what she was going through—what she might already have gone through in the past thirty-six hours. I was across the room cowering in my own little prison, trying to figure out how the hell I had gotten myself into this mess. And, more to the point, how was I going to get myself out of it?

  I wondered if anybody at the paper had missed me yet, and the awful truth was that they probably hadn’t. No one would really start worrying until deadline that night, which was hours and hours away. No telling what might happen in the meantime. Actually, there was plenty of telling. I just didn’t want to think about it.

  After spraying Justice for a good five minutes, he turned off the water, coiled the hose neatly, and came over to me. He looked me up and down with that same oddly detached expression, which for some reason made me furious; it seemed as though someone who goes to all the trouble of abducting women and locking them in cages should actually give a damn.

  But there he was, looking at me like I was a moth on a pin. He did it for quite a while before he spoke to me, and that interlude gave me plenty of time to go quietly nuts as I crouched there in the metal box, trying to figure out what I could possibly say or do to get out of this. I thought about everything I knew about this case, this man (although, frankly, it was hard to include him in the human race), and I couldn’t come up with a single thing that wouldn’t leave both myself and Justice as dead as the others.

  “Are you a good dog, or a bad dog?”

  Hearing his voice up close and personal scared the bejeezus out of me. It was low and quiet, with an underlying Texas twang that only made it more menacing. I stared at him, at a loss about what to say, when he repeated himself.

  “Are you a good dog, or a bad dog?”

  I opened my mouth to say something, although to this day I’m not quite sure what it was going to be. I like to imagine that it would have been something brave—big lies about how the cops were right behind me, and if he didn’t let us go he was going to wind up with a needle in his arm. Truth is, though, I was probably going to engage in some serious begging. But just as I was about to speak, I caught sight of Justice out of the corner of my eye. She was shaking her head madly, as she’d done every time I’d spoken to her. And all of a sudden I got the message: don’t talk.

  I’m not saying I’m any smarter than his other victims. But I’d been thinking about the case for weeks, and I had another girl there to warn me. But I’m convinced—dead certain—that the only reason I’m alive today is that I never said a single word.

  He treats people like dogs. He treats dogs like people. He tortures people and rescues dogs. People are bad dogs. Real dogs are good dogs. Or something. What the hell?

  It was a long shot, but it was the only chance I had. So I put my head down, raised my eyes in as pleading a look as I could muster, and barked at him.

  Yes, barked. As in woof-woof, ruff-ruff, yip-yip. I also panted, and gave him my goddamn paw. And I was so fucking scared, I didn’t even have the good sense to feel stupid.

  But it worked.

  “You’re a good dog,” he said, and stuck his fingers through the cage to scratch me on the head. “Good dog gets a cookie.” He went over to a jar on the counter, pulled out a gigantic Milk Bone, and stuck it through the chain link. I stared at it for a minute, then took it out of his hand with my teeth and dropped it on the floor. This didn’t seem to piss him off too much (it was, after all, extremely doglike), but it didn’t take long for me to realize that he was waiting for me to eat it.

  When you’re a vegetarian, people ask you lots of stupid questions. Chief among them is this: “If you were stranded on a desert island and the only thing you had was a case of Jimmy Dean sausage, would you eat it?” And the answer is: “Of course I’d eat it, you numbskull. If I were in a plane crash in the Andes with a bunch of dead soccer players, I’d eat them too.”

  I’d never actually had an opportunity to test this theory. But there I was in a cage, staring at cookie made out of dehydrated pig snouts and God only knows what else. I almost made the (possibly fatal) mistake of picking it up with my hands. But I remembered in time and picked it up with my teeth. Then I gagged that sucker down with all deliberate speed.

  The biscuit was crunchy, gross-tasting, and very, very dry. It made me incredibly thirsty, and when Gravink shoved a bowl of water through the slot at the bottom of the cage I didn’t have to pretend to lap it up.

  This seemed to satisfy him. He scratched me behind the ears again, told me to be good while he was gone, and walked out. I heard the door lock behind him. Then I gave him the finger.

  Okay, think, Bernier. The guy is insane. It’s only a matter of time before he notices you don’t actually have a tail. You have to get out of here, and you have to take Justice with you.

  I tried the cage, which was depressingly solid. I checked all the hinges, and thought that maybe I could unscrew them if I had enough time. But when I reached for my trusty Spyderco penknife, I realized it was on my key chain in my purse, which Gravink had not been kind enough to incarcerate with me. I tried to figure out if I had anything useful, and the only thing I could come up with was the zipper on my new Gap warm-up jacket. I was too scared to take the jacket off, in case Gravink walked in and caught me using an opposable thumb. So I stretched the zipper tab to the corner of the cage, stuck it into the screw head, and started turning. At first it wouldn’t budge. But then it gave, and after a whole lot of sweating and chipped fingernails I got the first screw out. One down, seven to go.

  I was only on the second one when I heard a key in the door, and in walked Gravink. He was holding a leash in one hand and a collar in the other, and what he said gave me equal parts terror and hope: “Do you want to go out and play?”

  He opened the cage door, and for a second I considered making a break for it. But then I realized that at least one of the other girls must have tried to get away, and failed. And if I didn’t outrun him, there was no way I could fight him off. He was around six feet tall with wide shoulders, big arms, and a thickish neck. Given his proportions, it was odd how much he looked like his petite sister. He had a surprisingly delicate nose on that big spud of a head, and his cupid’s-bow mouth might have been lifted straight from the police sketch of Amy Sue.

  Truth is, he didn’t look much like a killer to me. Just goes to show you what I know.

  He put the collar on me. For a second I was terrified that this was it—that I’d just let him put the instrument of my demise around my neck without even fighting back—but he didn’t seem interested in killing me at the moment. He even put two fingers under the collar to make sure it wasn’t too tight, then snapped the leash on and pulled it gently. I followed him across the floor on all fours, which wasn’t too bad; the linoleum was smooth, and for whatever reason he hadn’t decided to strip me. Yet.

  We went through another room that had sofas and chairs and orange wall-to-wall carpet, but from my floor-level vantage point it was impossible to get my bearings. I had no idea where the front door was, and how long it might take to get to it. The next thing I knew he was opening a different door, and I was being blinded by sunlight. I had to stop myself from covering my eyes—way too human—and a second later he’d unsnapped my leash, pushed me outside, and closed the door behind me. When my eyes finally adjusted to the brightness and I got a chance to look around, what I saw can only be described as a dog utopia.

  The yard was huge, a field of grass and wildflowers surrounded by an eight-foot privacy fence. Off to one side, by the house, was a water trough fed by a garden hose. Where I was crouched the ground was hard-packed dirt, an infield that held the kind of dog entertainment devices you see in agility trials. There were sawhorses to jump over and tunnels to go through, platforms of different levels for lounging and a kiddie pool to splash in. All in all, it was the canine equivalent of Romper Room.

  My first instinct was to stand up and
run for it, but on second thought it seemed like a bad idea. I couldn’t see any break in the fence where a gate might be—it would be locked anyway—and I was pretty sure that wherever Gravink was, he was watching me. So I stayed down on all fours, and before too long some of the dogs who’d been off playing in the high grass came over to check me out. Most of them were wary, but one came running right up to me and licked my face.

  Nanki-Poo.

  The name was out of my mouth before I could stop myself, and I hoped to hell our host hadn’t heard me. The dog seemed incredibly happy to see me, and I had a sinking feeling that he thought it meant C.A. would be coming to get him any minute. He did a happy little dog dance. And when he turned his tail to me, I saw that he’d been neutered.

  Oh, my God.

  I guess that’s when I started to figure it out, crouched there in the dirt on all fours. And what I saw next did nothing to shake my suspicion that I’d stumbled onto what was driving Bobby Ray Gravink’s mania. It was an elderly boxer-mix who wandered over to sniff me. I whispered the name Harley, and he started barking and wagging his tail. But here’s the really creepy thing: he could see. Someone had performed cataract surgery on Lynn Smith’s dog. And I had a strong suspicion just who that someone was—the same person who mutilated his owner in some weirdly symmetrical act of revenge.

  I stayed out there for a while, looking around and trying to get the lay of the land. Then I realized with a start that Justice was still in there with him, and God only knew what he was doing to her. So I crawled back to the house and did the most doglike thing I could think of. I scratched at the door.

  He opened it immediately, looking down at me and the rest of the pack with what I could swear was genuine adoration.

  This was fucking nuts.

  “Do you want to come in?” I looked up at him and panted some more. I hoped this meant yes. “Don’t you want to sit outside with Dr. Daddy?”

  If you really want to know, the truth is I’d like to rip Dr. Daddy’s throat open and get the hell out of here.

  I kept this fact to myself and did some more looking and panting. Finally, he went outside and sat on a big wooden bench. The other dogs followed him, so I did too. We all settled on the ground around him. It looked like goddamn story time at doggie day camp. Humiliating.

  “What gooooood dogs you are.” He spoke in that awful singsong voice people use on animals and little babies. I promised myself then and there I’d never use that tone again—assuming, of course, that I got out of this alive. “You know, we’ll have to go far away soon,” he was saying. “The bad people are looking for me. But I promise, I’ll take you all with me.”

  Oh, goodie.

  “The bad people don’t understand,” he went on. “They think Dr. Daddy does mean things. They don’t care what happens to you. All they care about is themselves. They were going to let you suffer and suffer…” He was starting to get teary, as though the idea of their (our?) suffering was just too much for him to bear. I thought for the fiftieth time how much I’d like to kill him. But I had to admit that it wasn’t quite as much as it would have been if he’d been murdering the women and the dogs.

  “Amy Sue didn’t understand,” he was saying. “She didn’t care when Mom and Dad killed you…” I wondered if he was talking about the family dog that had been euthanized, and decided it was best not to ask. “She didn’t try to stop them. She didn’t understand what I had to do. She didn’t want to help. All she wanted was to get away. She was as bad as they were. She was a killer just like they were. She had to be punished. It was for her own good. She was a very bad dog.”

  He’d worked himself into quite a lather by now. I was worried his head was going to explode, then decided it was fine with me if it did. But he calmed down eventually, and started throwing a tennis ball around the backyard. It was retrieved by a frisky young Doberman I assumed to be Cocoa. Its ears were still cropped, but there probably wasn’t much Gravink could have done about that. I stared at those two perky little points of flesh, and realized they had probably cost Patricia Marx her life.

  After Cocoa came back with the ball for the umpteenth time, Gravink told him “no more,” and started back into the house. I followed him, because I didn’t want to leave him alone with Justice, but he seemed to take it as a compliment. “You want to come inside with Dr. Daddy?” he said, and I tried to look all loyal and happy. I never realized being a dog was so much work.

  We went indoors, and Nanki-Poo followed as though he didn’t want to let me out of his sight. We passed through what I guessed was the living room, and since I wasn’t on the leash this time I could go more slowly and look around. The room was cheaply furnished, and there was grime on the windows that made everything look even dingier. I tried to remember what the house had looked like from the outside, and all I could think was that it had been pretty ramshackle. But that hadn’t warned me off at all; there are PhDs around Gabriel who spend the best years of their lives in an Airstream jacked up on cinder blocks.

  Gravink held open the door to his ersatz laboratory, and Nanki-Poo and I went in. He told us both to sit, then went to the cabinet and pulled out a drug vial. He reached into a drawer and pulled out a hypodermic and proceeded to fill it with blue liquid, measuring the dose carefully. When he was finished he put the vial back on the counter, and it was close enough so I could read the label.

  It was pentobarbital. Nasty nickname: “Blue Juice.”

  If I hadn’t lived with three veterinarians, I might have been in blissful ignorance about just what that was. But as it was, I knew that although pentobarbital is sometimes used as an anesthetic, when it’s colored blue that means the concentration is only meant for one thing. Euthanasia.

  He approached Justice’s cage with the needle and said that nasty mantra of his one more time. Bad dogs have to be punished. I started looking around frantically for something to whack him with, something that could knock him out before he had the chance to turn the needle on me.

  Then everything happened at once. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Nanki-Poo’s ears prick up, and he gave one sharp bark. Then the door to the lab was kicked open, and through it came Detective Brian Cody, scanning the room with his gun in classic cop fashion.

  It would probably have worked out fine if only I hadn’t been there. But seeing me on the floor was the last thing he must have expected. It took him by surprise, and he hesitated just for a second, so he didn’t see Gravink in the corner behind him until it was too late. His gun dropped a few inches, and it gave Gravink the chance to grab him. He got Cody in a half nelson with his left arm, then reached around with his right and jammed the needle into his heart.

  Cody stood there for what I will call one of the longest and worst moments of my life. Then his knees started to buckle, and his eyes fluttered shut. And as he toppled to the floor I’m pretty sure the last thing he saw was me.

  What I did next owed more to self-preservation and excessive viewing of cop shows than to any sort of bravery. When Cody fell his gun fell with him. It slid halfway across the floor and I grabbed it, faster than I would have thought possible. I have a fleeting memory of hoping the safety was off, and realizing I had no idea where to find it if it wasn’t. Then I stood up, aimed it at the middle of Bobby Ray Gravink’s chest, and fired.

  It was the first and only time I’ve held a gun in my life. But it seemed to have the desired effect. Gravink was rushing toward me, and then he wasn’t. He stared down at the hole in his chest and back at me. The look on his face said he couldn’t have been more surprised if an actual dog had stood up on its hind legs and cold-cocked him. He took another step forward, and I shot him again.

  I’ve always had very little patience for people in movies who think they’ve put the bad guy down, then turn their backs and get themselves killed. It always seemed to me the height of stupidity and bad taste. If you’ve got the gun in your hand, you use it. So even as Bobby Ray Gravink lay there bleeding on the ground, I stood over him and em
ptied the rest of the bullets into his midsection. And it was something of a disappointment to me that when I raised it to his head for the coup de grace, all it did was go click.

  I dropped the gun and felt Cody’s neck for a pulse, but couldn’t find one—not that I really knew where to look. I thought he was still breathing, maybe just faintly, so in what was probably not the best medical treatment, I shook him. Then I shook him harder, yelled at him, tried to bully him into waking up. I called his name over and over as I sat there crying on the ugly linoleum. I told him that he was going to be all right, that he’d saved my life, and that tough as I am, I couldn’t stand having two men I loved die in a single year.

  32

  THAT’S HOW THE COPS FOUND ME. CODY MUST HAVE called for backup before he came blazing in there, because within two minutes guys in bulletproof vests were swarming all over the place. I heard one of them yell officer down, and the next thing I knew people were pushing me aside to get to him. There were ambulances, and guys shouting into walkie-talkies, and at some point Chief Hill showed up and took me outside. He handed me my purse, and told me they’d found my car in the barn behind the house, where Gravink must have moved it after he locked me up, and that he was going to have one of his men drive it into town for me.

  Then I saw a body bag being wheeled out through the front door, and I nearly keeled over. “Cody…”

  “It’s not Cody,” he said, grabbing me before I could hit the ground. “That’s Gravink. Alex, did you hear me? That’s Gravink.”

  “Where’s Cody?”

  “On his way to the E.R.”

  “He saved my life. The girl’s too.”

  “I know. Try to calm down. Here, let the EMTs take a look at you.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “The hell you are, young lady.”